Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

“Eighty-nine dollars a month. That was her rent. Is that worth a human life? There’s a pattern here,” J. insisted. He clipped the article and showed it to Kramer when he returned, sniffing, pharmacy bag in his claw, from the allergist. Kramer called Noah Blumenthal, his point man on such matters, and by the end of the day, after negotiations in the editor in chief’s office (somewhere down the hall out there), the piece was out of the Metro section and into the feature well. J. felt he had discovered the outrage for the paper, he had contributed his first thing to the Downtown News. At dinner, he reiterated some of the dialogue from Kramer’s and Blumenthal’s conversations, to demonstrate to his parents the justice of his deferred education. “The cops are taking their cues from Koch and Reagan that black people don’t matter,” J. informed his parents. “Can you imagine what it will be like if Reagan gets reelected next week? It’s going to be a field day on black people.”

“Too bad that Mondale’s such a wimp,” J.’s father said.

“That’s going to be the message we send to the cops: That it’s okay. Eleanor Bumpurs killed in her own home! Michael Stewart choked to death by subway cops — anyone could be next,” J. protested, attacking the broccoli on his plate, saving the shrimp for last, his strategy with this particular dish.

“That’s why we always say save money for cabs home. It’s not safe on the subways at night,” J.’s father said.

“Right. But still — this is a police state we’re living in!” Cab fare cut into his bar money. He always took the subway home. Simple economics.

On Friday, Kramer looked pale and didn’t say much all morning. Less than usual. He spent a long time in the bathroom and when he came back he said that he had to visit the doctor immediately. (J. later recalled he had used an antifungal aerosal spray that morning.) There was a headline meeting at noon, so J. would have to go in his place. Jimmy Banks had seen the Bumpurs piece, but there might be some unforeseen questions, and if that happened J. was to give whatever information he could. Kramer rubbed his throat. “These meetings are pretty simple,” he wheezed. “You’ll probably not have to do anything, don’t worry about it. Just sit there.”

J. was going to enter the inner sanctum of the paper. On Thursday he had walked to the editor in chief’s office to deliver a reimbursement form for one of Kramer’s writers but the door was closed, and the secretary said she’d take the form, it was all right. J. had read the Noah Blumenthal piece; as in all the man’s work, righteous anger reverberated between the quotes and facts, as if meticulous research and the journalistic method were all that kept the man from becoming a homicidal vigilante. With disregard for department policies, with seemingly premeditated intent. Blumenthal in person, when he came in to drop off some factchecking material, was quite and nervous. Kramer told J. later that he lived with his mother in Queens and had only recently conquered a phobia about the subway. J. read the piece again before the headline meeting to make sure he could answer any question that might come up, perhaps regarding the one or two missing quotes Blumenthal was supposed to insert on Monday, or the missing sentence that started the third paragraph, which Kramer and Blumenthal were still arguing about. Who knew what they might ask. He wanted to be prepared.

This was the kind of work he wanted to do, J. thought, squinting at the printout and underlining with his finger dot matrix outrage. These were real stories. He had been raised in a cocoon, programmed for achievement, but there was a whole city out there that was unruly and didn’t give a shit about plans. And he wanted to take his place in it. He wanted to know where reporters got their statistics about rates of crime, and how they requested secret files the government and big business didn’t want the public to know. The clandestine order that made things go. Blumenthal had read Emergency Services’ protocols on the use of deadly physical force and had interviewed Eleanor Bumpurs’s case counselor. The reporter had looked up Officer Sullivan’s record of nineteen years on the police force and had seen a pattern there. He found things that converged in one place and time from different parts of the city, like people on a subway car, and violence was the result. J. felt a part of the Bumpurs piece, he had turned Kramer on to it, and though it was a small step it was his first, and that’s how you learn to walk, he thought.

A few minutes before noon, Freddie called J. from his dorm room at NYU to give him the lowdown on the night. Sophie’s was the ticket: they’d spend the night on Avenue A, and Julia was going to bring some of her friends maybe, they were still negotiating, and then J. looked at the clock and saw he was late for the meeting.

He ran between the cubicles, left and right, skidded down the blue tile floor. The door to the editor in chief’s office was closed. He was too late. Kramer was going to kill him. The secretary looked up at him, and raised her eyebrows to say, yes? “I’m supposed to be in the meeting,” J. said.

“So go right in,” she said, and pawed the in-box.

He turned the handle slowly.

It turned out that the white guy with suspenders was Jimmy Banks, the editor in chief, and he sat behind a desk of black metal with his hands clasped together. Behind him on the wall, framed covers of the Downtown News’s first few issues hung in parallel authority, to remind the people in the room of tradition in solid black and white ink beyond reproach, reiterating quaint outrages of a simpler city. There were ten others in the room, those whom J. had seen designated by bylines and their editorial maneuverings over the years, but he did not know whose face belonged to which riveting personal essay, which exposé, which descent into the downtown after-hours abyss in search of the first piece about the new raging drug. They slouched indolently in chairs, drooped on the floor, in the stiff gray cushions of the couch along the back wall, drinking coffee and diet soda, notebooks agape. They looked at J. but did not say anything. He sat along the back wall, on the floor, next to a thin woman with black fingernails, black dress and oily, glinting dyed black hair. He did not intend to speak unless addressed. He listened to the old hands of the Downtown News to see how it worked.

“Bumpurs — I’m trying to riff on that.”

“Cops and Bumpurs. Do the Bump. Bump me in the morning and didn’t just walk away.”

“Bump, jump, lump, stump …”

“The cops knock on the door and—”

“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

“Maybe we should focus on the cops.”

“Knock knock. Who’s there? Cop. Cop who? Cop come to kill ya.”

“How about Shooting Range in High Bridge? You know, because they have those rooms in the basement of the precinct for target practice.”

“Did anyone besides the cops see that she had a knife, or just them? Because that’s something. That’s an angle.”

“High Bridge Target Range. Target Practice.”

“Bumpurs, Bumpurs, Bumpurs …”

“Permanent Eviction.”

“Her family says there’s no way she could have attacked them because she had a heart condition. And arthritis.”

“Shotgun, High Bridge: The Blankety Blank of Blankety Blank.”

“Are NYC Cops the City’s Secret Police?”

“Go Nazi — secret police, Gestapo, something along those lines.”

“Are NYC Cops the City’s Gestapo?”

“Gestapo on 174th Street.”

“This isn’t a Sidney Lumet film.”

“Hump, mump, dump, pump … I’m thinking.”

“Jackboots on 174th Street.”